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Dan Roth, executive editor of LinkedIn

Like many in the business world, my first social network was LinkedIn.

However, back in 2004 when I started using the business networking site, I didn't see it so much as a social network but as a way to keep track of all my contacts online, an Internet rolodex of sorts.

A decade and 200 million users later, I'm still using the Internet rolodex, only now I go back for entirely different reasons. That's because in addition to being a way to keep track of hundreds of potential business partners, LinkedIn has become something of a media company.

So how does LinkedIn get the biggest names in business and elsewhere to pen original content? I decided to sit down with the man responsible for company's editorial initiatives, LinkedIn's executive editor Dan Roth, to find out.

Below are some excerpts from our conversation, edited lightly for the sake of brevity. You can listen to the full, unedited conversation by clicking the orange play button in the embedded Soundcloud player below.

WOLF: What's a guy who came from Fortune doing over at LinkedIn?

ROTH: As I moved into online media, it seemed one of the great things that could happen was journalists would write articles and the comments would fill with up with people in those industries telling the journalists why what they were saying was right or wrong.

When I was at Fortune, everything we did was opinionated. But the comments were not filling up with really smart people, they were filling up with things like 'I'm first' or 'You're dumb'. It wasn't the kind of quality comments, because we weren't reaching the right people.

At LinkedIn, because of the data we have on who our members are, because they are constantly telling us what they are interested in by what they click on or who they choose to follow on LinkedIn, we get a lot of information about what types of stories to get in front of them.

WOLF: There's been a lot of talk about your algorithm (for targeting news). Can you shed a little light on how your target what people want to read based on their clicks?

ROTH: It has a lot to do with who you told us you are. Once you put your profile into LinkedIn, you give us certain insights into what you're interested in. We know what companies you worked for, what industries those companies are in, what your network looks like. There are all these signals that great algorithms can use to understand what your world might look like.

WOLF: LinkedIn launched their influencer program last fall. How do you define an influencer?

ROTH: To back up, the idea of the influencer program was 'can you get the smartest people in business, non-profit, philanthropy, anyone who is driving the professional conversation, can you get them writing original content on LinkedIn and make them followable?'

WOLF: How did you decide on the original 'pilot cast' of 150 influencers?

ROTH: The easy explanation is this: we asked 'if you were going to put on the best conference in the world for business, who would you want on stage?' That is really where we started.

WOLF: What were those initial conversations with influencers like?

ROTH: When we launched, we were making promises about what this was going to be, but we didn't have a product to show them. The pitch was the 'largest collection of professionals ever assembled. You have no better way to reach them directly without a middleman.'

Since then the conversation has changed a little because the program now exists and we can show them who else is writing. Jeff Immelt (the CEO of GE) just started last week. That changes how we talk to other CEOs. We say, 'here is the kind of content that Jeff Immelt is writing. It's not PR. It's not marketing.

WOLF: How do you tell someone like Richard Branson he's a terrible writer? (ed. note: this may be obvious, but this question was for illustrative purposes; Roth didn't suggest anyone is a poor writer).

ROTH: Here it's about helping these influencers understand what would make their post work better. We give them data and the data really helps make the decision. We see an 80% improvement in click through rate when an image is attached to a post.

A lot of times we ask 'have you thought about changing this paragraph to say this, did you mean to say this?' Some influencers say 'I meant this exactly as it is' and we say 'fine, it's your platform.' Others will very happily take the advice.

If you'd like to hear Michael Wolf's entire conversation with Dan Roth, play it above or at SoundCloud or subscribe to the NextMarket podcast at iTunes. You can follow Wolf on Twitter here.